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Tuesday, July 4, 2017

HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY!

Neil Young

Our 2nd POTUS: "Government is instituted for the common good; for the protection, safety, prosperity and happiness of the people; and not for the profit, honor, or private interest of any one man, family, or class of men: Therefore the people alone have an incontestable, unalienable, and indefeasible right to institute government; and to reform, alter, or totally change the same, when their protection, safety, prosperity and happiness require it."

"And so, this Fourth of July, the challenge is to widen the aperture of our patriotism beyond the president. We are living through a stress test to the American system and we can’t afford to simply tune out or bask in the cynicism of moral relativism. Liberal democracy is not a guarantee and the alternatives have proven themselves worse in every way for fans of individual liberty.
But we can take comfort from the fact that our founders designed the Constitution with someone very much like Donald Trump in mind.

5 comments:

On this Fourth of July, twelve score and one year after our fathers brought forth a nation dedicated to the proposition that lots of white guys are created somewhat equal, it is altogether fitting and proper that we should gather to ponder just how far we have fallen, thanks mostly to white guys who are so strikingly inferior they would actually vote for a swamp creature called Donald J. Trump.

One gauge of our plunge into infamy comes from President John Kennedy, who remarked at a 1962 dinner Screen Shot 2017-07-04 at 5.09.54 AMhonoring Nobel Prize winners: "I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone."

Whatever his flaws, Jefferson was indeed extraordinary, a presidential polymath of exquisite abilities that followed the rich thoughtfulness of John Adams and preceded the intellectual depths of James Madison. Here was an era of what historians have called the politics of deference — a national environment in which average white guys honored self-evident talent and superior knowledge, rather than elevating witless demagogues.

With the augmented franchise of extraordinarily average white guys came the demagogic shame of Jacksonianism, but America rebounded soon enough in the splendor of Abraham Lincoln, whose magnificent presidency was made possible by the splintering off of Southern-demagogue-loving white guys, who, in their professed love of country, damn near destroyed it. The genetic spawn of these morons is now laughably known as The Party of Lincoln, headed up by America's most egregious moron yet. But let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Presidentially intervening were Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt, who, also despite their flaws, made America great through progressive innovations. A generation later, Theodore's fifth cousin and founder of modern progressivism made America the greatest nation on earth — for which contemporary conservatives have never forgiven him, since FDR's own greatness shone through in compassion and pragmatism.

These were fundamentals of leadership antithetical to conservatism's increasingly singular ideology of political power by any means, which appeals to rank-and-file white imbeciles of an authoritarian bent — and made Donald J. Trump the great white hope of perversity unbound.

Hence now we're engaged in a great civil war, of sorts, testing whether this nation, conceived and dedicated to the proposition of democratic rule, can long endure the demagogic witlessness of Trump and the boundless depravity of his followers. My money is on yes, even though ours is the most wretched, unAmerican Fourth of July since that of 1861."